


As Stern as Faerie, as Soft as Man

by isadora_drunken



Category: Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell & Related Fandoms, Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell (TV), Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell - Susanna Clarke, Maleficent (2014)
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2016-10-19
Updated: 2016-10-19
Packaged: 2018-08-23 08:52:47
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,172
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8321674
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/isadora_drunken/pseuds/isadora_drunken
Summary: AU in which the English faerie roads lead to Maleficent's Moors. Childermass wanders them, because he's Childermass and he does as he pleases.





	

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> AU in which the English faerie roads lead to Maleficent's Moors. Childermass wanders them, because he's Childermass and he does as he pleases.

She met him in the shadows. The slices of erstwhile light between the here and the other. The roads were well rutted by her kind. Pockets of faerie memory inked the landscape. But the face she saw that evening was something else. It wasn’t the whisper of memory an it wasn’t one of her own. 

A cunning in the dark eyes. An impermanence too. 

For less than a heartbeat, she stopped. Phantom wings rippled, slicing glassy air. She started and gasped. There was churring in the dark. The mortal smile melted slyly away, gone to haunt some other road. 

~

She took to the moss that night. Not the trees, not anymore. Climbing was too queer, a gross facsimile of faerie form. She curled beneath the green. Like every night, the curse sank back into her bones. Stefan’s anguish: raw and deep, but measured even then to royal proportions. His heart was studded with kingly jewels, no longer true. 

Nevertheless, he’d begged. Oh how he’d begged. She savored this corrosive joy every waking moment. And then, when it caught up to her in the threshhold times: _a child. She is but a child. What have I done?_

The shame gnawed her awake. Somewhere in the wind, a baby wailed. Stefan’s torment couldn’t snuff it out. She shifted back against the roots, tipping her chin to the sky. The better to count the stars.

Tonight something darker and leaner sparkled among them. Maleficent’s throat stiffened, then eased - _no, it isn’t him_. She hadn’t seen his face, but she was sure of it. Even as a boy, Stefan was keen, always, for battle. The figure melting into starry pitch had no fight within it. It had come not to conquer but to listen. 

She straightened her horned head in inquiry, but he - yes, it was certainly a _he_  - wasn’t looking at her. He was looking at the stars.

She slept. In dreams that thin dark smile wriggled under her skin and bit the tender flesh. She batted it down like an irksome fly, but still it - _he_  - insisted. 

“Show me what you are,” Maleficent heard herself say. “Show me your hand.”

The light was fine and yellow when she woke. Phantom wings swept off the last of the dreaming. In daylight their loss needled and stung; in the maybe-hours, the in-betweens, she was free to roam the dregs of memory. When she lifted her head, the thin dark smile was smiling across the river. 

“Wait!”

She barely heard herself cry out. The figure did not hear, or made as though he hadn’t. She leapt to her feet, ready to take the river at a soaring vault, until flesh caught up with memory and she stood dumbly at the shore. The figure stepped into morning mist and out of her sight.

 Her fingernails bit into sinewy palm. “Show yourself!” 

“I am the keeper of these Moors, so help me, and I must know who travels them!”

But the air stayed still and clear. The guest had vanished; Maleficent was sure of that. Though benign, his presence rattled her. She had already lost her wings. To lose the trust of this ancient, quarrelsome land - to no longer keep its confidence - would be an indignity too far.

She sank against the tree-trunk. The last of the stars still twinkled doggedly in the fog, swaddled by ghosts of their fellows. She studied them absently, hoping for something etched in their vast, furtive grain.

“Show yourself,” she whispered. “What did you see?”

With that, the mist brought her an answer. It rolled gently into a frame - tall, ragged - pooling where features should be, building mouth and nose from stone and eyes from shining cosmos. A he. The mist reared back to leave him whole and fleshly, but there was still something of the rough in him, like soot fashioned into form. She spoke before his sullen lips could part.

“You’ve returned. Well practiced.”

“I have no choice,” said the stranger, “when a faerie summons me thrice.”

“And I am more than simple faerie,” said Maleficent. “I am the guardian of these lands. I know every rut and crag. These rivers are my blood, the trees my bones. They speak when I bid them to speak. Yet they do not tell me of you. You’ve enchanted them, of a sort. Who are you?”

The stranger’s lips slid this way and that, working toward obeisance. “I am called Childermass,” he said.

“It’s no use to me what you’re called. What is your name?”

“Childermass,” he said slowly, “is as much as you’ll get. Seeing as you haven’t offered any part of your own.”

“It’s not for you to ask. Nor to know.”

“Well,” said the man called Childermass, “I suppose we’ve reached an impasse. Haven’t we, Maleficent?”

What once were wings roared as her name left his lips. The phantoms beat the air until a wind unsettled her cloak. Something twisted her belly.

“You’ve heard of me. Who has sent you?”

“No one but my ears and my own two feet. I hear the magic throbbing, and I follow where it comes. Sometimes it tells me its name. Yours was an easy catch. It’s buried in every bit of this land. It’s unusual,” he added, “for one faerie to hold such domain.”

“And you know much of faeries?”

“I know enough.”

A shiver roiled Maleficent’s chest. “What are you, one they call Childermass?”

“I am confidant to someone nobler than I. Once I was a pickpocket. Foremost I am a man.”

A man! A mortal man with blood that would curdle and bones that would break. A creature made of all that was fragile. Mortal men fought their end with knives and sticks and venom, and still it took them. They were made to be broken. Maleficent almost laughed.

“A _man?_ No man can sniff out magic. Perhaps you have taken the guise of a man, Childermass, but do not hide from me.”

“I swear it, madam. I was born in Yorkshire to one Black Joan. I picked pockets until my master came for me. If I am made of anything but blood and bones, I shall be eager to hear it.”

“You must be a ruler among mortals,” Maleficent breathed. She made no pains to hide her astonishment. Magic in a man!

He chuckled then, a low and graveled sound that slid beneath her skin.

“Hardly. I am footman and bootblack to the greatest magician in England. I am acquainted with the next greatest, and a few who would fancy themselves great one day. They cultivate the art. I only listen. If I have learned the shadows, madam, it’s because that is where I’m kept.”

His features blurred. Slowly, mist began reclaiing them. 

“I am called home, madam,” said the sooty mortal man. “My master.”

“Maleficent,” she said, surprising herself. “Use it. Whisper my name and I will summon you. Surely your master knows you can’t refuse a faerie call.” 

“Maleficent,” he repeated, the word gritty on his tongue. “Until then.”


End file.
